The sentimental narrative of the orphan adopted by a French corporal
and, upon his death, by an aloof and psychologically damaged Englishman living in France,
Mr. Langley. [Commentary continues below.]

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Passage Illustrated

A mere mite of a girl stood on the steps of the Barber's
shop, looking across the Place. A mere baby, one might call her,
dressed in the close white linen cap which small French country children
wear (like the children in Dutch pictures), and in a frock of homespun
blue, that had no shape except where it was tied round her little fat
throat. So that, being naturally short and round all over, she looked,
behind, as if she had been cut off at her natural waist, and had had her
head neatly fitted on it.

"There's the child, though."

To judge from the way in which the dimpled hand was rubbing the eyes, the
eyes had been closed in a nap, and were newly opened. But they seemed to be looking so
intently across the Place, that the Englishman looked in the same direction.

"Oh!" said he presently. "I thought as much. The Corporal's there."

The Corporal, a smart figure of a man of thirty, perhaps a
thought under the middle size, but very neatly made, — a sunburnt
Corporal with a brown peaked beard, — faced about at the moment,
addressing voluble words of instruction to the squad in hand. Nothing
was amiss or awry about the Corporal. A lithe and nimble Corporal,
quite complete, from the sparkling dark eyes under his knowing uniform
cap to his sparkling white gaiters. The very image and presentment of a
Corporal of his country's army, in the line of his shoulders, the line
of his waist, the broadest line of his Bloomer trousers, and their
narrowest line at the calf of his leg. ["His Boots," p. 219]

At bottom, it was for this reason, more than for any
other, that Mr. The Englishman took it extremely ill that Corporal
Théophile should be so devoted to little Bebelle, the child at the
Barber’s shop. In an unlucky moment he had chanced to say to himself,
“Why, confound the fellow, he is not her father!” There was a sharp
sting in the speech which ran into him suddenly, and put him in a worse
mood. So he had National Participled the unconscious Corporal with most
hearty emphasis, and had made up his mind to think no more about such a
mountebank.

But it came to pass that the Corporal was not to be
dismissed. If he had known the most delicate fibres of the Englishman's
mind, instead of knowing nothing on earth about him, and if he had been
the most obstinate Corporal in the Grand Army of France, instead of
being the most obliging, he could not have planted himself with more
determined immovability plump in the midst of all the Englishman's
thoughts. Not only so, but he seemed to be always in his view. Mr. The
Englishman had but to look out of window, to look upon the Corporal with
little Bebelle. He had but to go for a walk, and there was the Corporal
walking with Bebelle. He had but to come home again, disgusted, and the
Corporal and Bebelle were at home before him. If he looked out at his
back windows early in the morning, the Corporal was in the Barber's back
yard, washing and dressing and brushing Bebelle. If he took refuge at
his front windows, the Corporal brought his breakfast out into the
Place, and shared it there with Bebelle. Always Corporal and always
Bebelle. Never Corporal without Bebelle. Never Bebelle without Corporal. [p. 220]

Commentary

Whereas E. G. Dalziel in his Household
Edition illustration focuses on the minor, comic characters of the sentimental tale
for Christmas time, Madame Bouclet (Langley's landlady) and her lodger, Monsieur Mutuel,
whose verbal sparring opens the story, Eytinge focuses on the manly corporal and his
diminutive charge, the characters whose fortunes constitute the main thrust of the story.
Abbey in his 1876 illustration maintains the sentimental strain by realising the moment
when the aloof Englishman discovers little Bebelle at the corporal's grave. In contrast,
Harry Furniss in the Charles Dickens Library Edition focuses instead on Christopher, The
old waiter who serves as the narrator of the frame of Somebody's
Luggage (1862). Eytinge brings the eye well forward to admire the lean, masculine
figure of the Corporal, who tenderly brushes the head of the toddler by his side; however,
the illustrator also uses the figure of the child to carry the eye backward to the
dark-coated, middle-aged bourgeois observing them, surely the solitary Englishman, Mr.
Langley. Perhaps the best modelled and most emotionally satisfying illustration for "His
Boots" is Charles Green's 1868 wood-engraving of the uniformed Corporal playing with
Bebelle in an old street in the "dull old fortified French town" (215), probably
Boulogne, where Dickens's sons went to school and with which Dickens would have been
familiar from his trips to nearby
Condette with his mistress
Ellen Ternan in the early 1860s — precisely when this story was written. The
ten-part framed tale Somebody's Luggage, of which this was the
second part, first appeared in the Christmas Story for 1862 in
All the Year
Round.